[desktop-discuss] [pkg-discuss] Modify pkgbuild to make IPS images

[Philip Brown]

Joe Di Pol wrote:
> Danek Duvall wrote:
>>>...
>> The way we'd intended to do these was to dump everything into a single
>> package, tag files appropriately, and use filters to install selectively.
>> That is,
>>
>>     file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so.1
>>     file path=usr/lib/libsdl.so devel=true
>>     directory path=usr/include/sdl devel=true
>>     file path=usr/include/sdl/sdl.h devel=true
>>     file path=usr/man/man3/libsdl.3 docs=true
>>
>> etc.  Locale-specific packages would be handled similarly, but there you'd
>> have a "locale" tag which would specify the locale a particular file
>> belonged to.
> 
> I wonder if this is a case were technical elegance is getting in the way
> of familiarity and usability. Tagging and filtering appear to have some
> excellent use cases, but I'm not sure using them to functionally organize
> a package is one.
> 
> Folks are pretty familiar with the concept of a package name reflecting
> what it contains, and being able to use that name to get what they want.
> It's hard to see how filtering is better than "pkg install foo-docs"
> 

Yup. wearing my "plain user" hat rather than my "developer" hat, I much 
prefer typing

pkg install foo-devel

rather than

pkg install foo devel=true

It's an existing de facto standard of behaviour, and users are comfortable 
with it already. Dare I say, "expect it".